Bob Dylan Page 6
3
FOLK STARDOM: STAR AS ORDINARY, STAR AS SPECIAL
It is important to not allow the one label, ‘stardom’, obscure the differences between the experiences of celebrity in different areas of cultural life. The expectations and limitations of, say, film stars differ from those associated with television personalities. Similarly, even though popular music stars share some elements of stardom in common, there can still be widely divergent expectations within different genres. Take, for example, the issue of wealth. Conspicuous consumption on clothes, or yachts, by pop stars such as Elton John is not questioned; pop is about glamour and wealth. Hip hop, in a parody of American consumerism, is also a genre where extravagant consumption is endorsed. Such consumer extravagances have to be justified or downplayed by rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen, however, as they are seen to undermine the artistic credentials of the artist involved.1
Allowing for such generic differences, there are ways in which popular music stars are distinctive from other types of celebrity and star. One example is the link between popular music stars and the particular ‘community’ from which they emerge.2 Stars are often seen as representing and reflecting the attitudes of the social group from which they emerge and of speaking for that group; the young, the working class, the urban, and so on. This fact is emphasised when one considers that many of the significant popular genres have emerged from dispossessed social groups; so, for example, soul stars spoke for the black experience, country music the southern white experience, and so on. It is hard for bands like Keane, who are clearly not dispossessed, to gain cultural legitimacy.
What is particularly important, however, is how popular music stars from a range of genres are seen as representing a particular generational experience. More than an association with a particular locality or social group, popular music is primarily interpreted as an expression of youth experience. Rojek offers one example of this:
Pop icons differ from other celebrities in appearing to speak for their generation. They provide a sexual focus and a populist articulation of generational beliefs and values which lifts them from the confines of popular entertainment and bestows upon them general cultural and political significance.3
Rojek goes on to suggest that, during the 1940s, Frank Sinatra represented the youth that America lost because of the war. While this may be true, it is different from the way that stars came to be understood as the spokespeople of youth during the 1960s. Sinatra may have been a representation of a generation, but he was in no way a representative of that generation. Rojek points out that Sinatra never approached his audience as an equal and made no claims to be speaking on behalf of a particular group. Neither was he primarily a young person’s singer, his audience comprising both adults and young people, reflecting the general listening patterns of the 1940s and early 1950s. However, the emergence of rock and roll, particularly Elvis Presley, gave young people a distinctive music that could be claimed as their own. Elvis also demonstrated the emerging market power (and hence social power) of young people,4 which brings me to the second way that popular music stars are distinctive: they have a political significance. By political, I do not necessarily mean conventional politics. Elvis was not a political radical. He was, however, political in the way he energised a social group with radical potential. He signified a particular group that was portrayed as threatening and out of control. Elvis thus symbolised the potential for change and this explains his social significance and that of subsequent popular music stars. ‘Popular music, in its constant reformulation into new songs . . . represents change itself and the chaos that change can potentially produce. The popular music celebrity, then, is often the public representation of change.’5
The idea that pop stars reflect and represent a generational experience, and that this experience is politically significant, emerged during the 1950s. It is in the 1960s, however, that these characteristics developed into a more explicit creed. During this decade a new generation was portrayed as exhibiting a new and radical social consciousness and popular music stars came to be seen as embodying that radical consciousness. Particularly significant in this regard is the emergence of a new genre of music – rock – and the integration of ideals from the earlier folk revival into mainstream popular music. In these transformations, Bob Dylan’s stardom is a crucial factor. Dylan is portrayed as virtually singlehandedly providing popular music with a political awareness. Wayne Hampton suggests that he was ‘the first truly popular artist in America to exhibit a social consciousness’.6 Such hyperbole is clearly unsupportable. Whatever Dylan’s achievements at this time, they depend on a variety of factors beyond his control and a social and musical context that structured his musical development and star persona. Stardom, however, is different from sociological or biographical fact. One of the chief functions of stardom is to individualise complicated social processes, to ‘stand for’ and represent particular historical moments. In this instance, both at the time and in subsequent portrayal, the symbol ‘Dylan’ represents a radical youth, a politicised sixties and (together with The Beatles) the symbiotic relationship of rock music and social experience. ‘More than any other popular artist in America, Bob Dylan came to embody the essence of the 1960s counterculture.’7 However, star representations are always simplifications, and Dylan’s relationship to the politics of the decade, and to the folk revival more generally, is more ambivalent than symbiotic. Chapter 5 will discuss how Dylan’s star-image became more thoroughly entwined with the politics of the sixties counterculture even as he tried to distance himself from it. In this chapter, I want to discuss the initial development of Dylan’s stardom by looking at his emergence into the folk music scene of the early sixties and discuss the political and musical tensions in his relationship with the folk revival. I will then explain how these tensions reflect the emergence of a new type of political consciousness within popular music and how the inherent contradictions in the idea of a ‘folk star’ reflects the commercial origins of the folk revival.
FOLK MUSIC AND THE FOLK REVIVAL
The American ‘folk revival’ is generally presented as beginning with the release of ‘Tom Dooley’ by The Kingston Trio in 1958. With smooth harmonies and well-produced sound, neither the song nor the band could really be considered ‘authentic folk’, but the song was an old folk tune and featured an understated presentation and acoustic instrumentation. It heralded an interest in songs that told stories and were presented without the usual trappings of mainstream commercial music. The revival’s commercial and cultural apex occurred in 1963 and it fizzled out soon afterwards, with a final ending date generally given as the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan was backed by an electric band. In all likelihood, the American folk revival would warrant a small paragraph as another short-lived fad in a historical survey of popular music, were it not for two things: its historical congruence with the American civil rights movement; and the fact that it produced the most influential figure in popular music history and, as such, is foundational in the emergence of rock music.
The folk revival of the late fifties and early sixties had its roots in earlier folk movements. These maintained explicit links to organised working-class politics. In America, this historical link goes back to the 1900s and the International Workers of the World union (IWW, also known as the Wobblies). The principle of the union was that all members of the working class, whatever their profession or nationality, should join together in one union. It favoured direct political action to advance working-class rights and one of its notable features was its use of song to unite members on picket lines and marches. From its inception in 1905, the IWW published The Little Red Songbook, a regularly updated collection of labour songs. One individual dominated the songbook, however: Joe Hill, a prolific songwriter who often parodied hymns to incite political awareness. Hill was convicted for murder, and executed, thus becoming a martyr to the Wobblies’ cause. His execution can be seen as part of the violent government repression of the IWW
and, by the end of the 1910s, many of its leaders had been killed or imprisoned. By the mid-1920s, IWW membership was in terminal decline. This was far from the end of the link between folk music and working-class politics, however. The 1930s, containing the depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the rise of European fascism, was the only time in which communism made an impression on mainstream American political consciousness. Indeed, during this time, communism was promoted by its supporters as the only system true to American ideals and, once again, folk music was seen by left-wing intellectuals and folklorists as a way of raising political consciousness. From around 1935, folk music and radical politics became thoroughly intertwined. In 1945, a number of singers, ‘led’ by Pete Seeger, formed People’s Songs, dedicated to the dissemination of folk songs that ‘talk about life as it really is’. In 1948, Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party ran for president on a radical platform – against the Cold War and in favour of giving full voting rights to Black Americans – and folk music played a significant role in his campaign. Wallace was unsuccessful, however and, by the end of the 1940s, this folk revival ran out of steam, beset by disillusionment and McCarthyism. Many of the folksingers active in this period, including Pete Seeger, Josh White, Theo Bikel and Oscar Brand, were still important figures in folk music during the later revival that occurred around 1960.
Although figures from folk’s past were still active in this later folk revival, the folk boom of the early sixties became clearly associated with young people. Cold War politics and ‘the ever present danger of nuclear holocaust’8 seems to have produced a change in generational consciousness and partly explains why the new revival took on a specifically youthful dimension. The existential experience of potential annihilation seems to have weighed particularly heavily on the newer generation’s shoulders and played a significant role in the emergence of a critical, but specifically youthful, consciousness. The folk revival became, for a time, the chosen mode of expression for a new generation who saw it as their historical role to change society for the better, to force post-war society to live up to its ideals and promises. During this period, youth became the touchstone for critical consciousness, as ‘a conception formed, more taste than ideology, more style than discourse, more interpersonal than historical, that the world had been gravely mismanaged by the parent generation’.9 At this particular moment, the idea emerged that it was up to the young to take matters into their own hands if things were to be recovered. The demographic coincidence generated by the end of the Second World War produced a generation of young people who saw it as their destiny to put right the errors of their predecessors. It was also the first cohort to generate a distinctive politicised youth culture, and, initially, the channel through which it spoke was folk music. Rock would come later and be seen as the most significant form of youth culture, but rock would not have developed as it did without the folk revival and its associated understandings of the political role of youth. And, more than anybody else, Bob Dylan came to stand for, embody and define, this new generational understanding:
As the revivalists knew, the meaning of their movement was thus most mysteriously and powerfully embodied in Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. In them youthful sexuality vivified the cultural forms to which certain ideals of American democracy had been aligned – innocence and freedom, independence, piety and duty, equality, conscience, and revolt; and at the same time those forms lent the kind of articulation, almost of poetry, to their considerable personal beauty, interest, and force.10
As Dylan’s stardom developed, it came to signify a politically impatient generation with a willingness to speak out against society’s ills. Dylan came to be seen not only as a representation of this particular social group, as a symbol that ‘stood for’ the group, but also as a representative of that group, someone speaking on their behalf. He was famously labelled as the ‘Spokesman of a Generation’, and this begs the question ‘why?’. Why is it Bob Dylan who emerges as the embodiment of the movement and, beyond that, of politicised youth? Why, given that Dylan repeatedly said he was speaking for no one but himself, did he become defined as a spokesman? The conventional way of explaining this is to argue that it was the strength of his songs and his personality that led him to the top. His songs were much better than others, his personality more charismatic. This is the success myth of stardom in a meritocracy; that talent and hard work will be rewarded. It is also the myth of art, that there is absolute aesthetic quality which shines out. Neither myth is true – talented and charismatic people are overlooked; tastes and values in art change – and neither offers an adequate explanation for why Dylan and why that moment. We cannot rely on a purely individualistic or artistic explanation; instead we need to examine the relationship between Dylan and that particular moment.
The French sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann attempted to develop a method for providing an analytical basis for aesthetic value. Rather than assuming aesthetic value to be based on subjective experience, Goldmann tried to explain why some works and writers were better than others. His approach was to look at the relationship between the work and the social environment in which it was produced because, for Goldmann, ‘no important work can ever be the expression of a purely individual experience’.11 Instead, Goldmann suggests the idea of ‘the collective subject’, the collective consciousness of a particular social group. This collective consciousness is not separate from individuals – it can only exist through the consciousness of each individual – but it is also something more than merely individual consciousness; it is a shared mental structure which shapes the actions and thoughts of those in the social group. These mental structures ‘simultaneously organise the empirical consciousness of a particular social group and the imaginative world created by the writer’.12 Goldmann then distinguishes between the actual, empirical, consciousness of a group (what it actually thinks and acts in daily life, including its contradictions and inconsistencies) and its potential collective consciousness (the logical, coherent and unified expression of the social group). Goldmann calls this potential collective consciousness the group’s ‘world view’ and argues that great works of art are those that best encapsulate a world view – thus the great work does not merely reproduce the empirical ‘what is’ of the social group but actually encompasses its wider coherence.
I do not agree entirely with Goldmann’s approach as it tends towards overly sociological explanations of artistic works.* However, he is correct to argue that we can never explain the greatness of works merely by analysing their internal, aesthetic logic. This is because ‘explanation always refers to a structure that contains and surpasses the structure being studied’13 – we always have to bring social factors into our analysis. Furthermore, I think his concept of a ‘world view’ is useful for considering the relationship between Dylan and the folk revival. My argument is that Dylan’s work best expresses the world view of the generation who initially used the folk revival as a means of voicing political disquiet. However, Dylan’s relationship to the folk revival was not straightforward and at times the relationship was quite strained. This is because of the fact that, although on the surface there appears to be continuity between the sixties folk revival and earlier revivals, there is actually a significant rupture, and the political sensibility of the new generation had a different edge to the older folkies. This tension between the old and new illustrates how the content of a particular cultural object – in this case, a song – always contains social and political dimensions.
DYLAN AND THE FOLK REVIVAL
Dylan’s initial musical interest was in rock and roll rather than folk music. Just before he enrolled at the University of Minnesota, however, he developed an interest in folk, mostly in the figure of Woody Guthrie. The link between folk music and radical politics during the 1930s and 1940s was mainly the product of middle-class activity – intellectuals, activists and folklorists like Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax. Woody, however, was a notable outsider; a folksinger from Oklahoma who had exp
erienced family trauma (his older sister died in a fire, his dad was crippled, his mother institutionalised because of Huntington’s Chorea) and social misfortune (the area in which he was born was devastated by the dust bowl storms that destroyed the farming industry in Oklahoma, pushing thousands into poverty). With his family destroyed, Guthrie, aged fourteen, began travelling, singing and writing songs. Guthrie’s politics were inherently left-leaning but he was not the type to be allied to a dogmatic party political line, instead singing about the experiences of ordinary people and the trials they have to endure because of governments and corporations. When he arrived in New York in 1940, however, he was immediately welcomed by the politically minded folk community and he became the emblem of the inherent creativity and nobility of ordinary Americans. Guthrie became understood not as a representative speaking on behalf of the people, but a representation of ‘the people’, an embodiment of ‘the folk’.
Dylan became enchanted by the figure of Guthrie, especially the romanticised portrayal in his autobiography, Bound for Glory.* Guthrie became a totem for the folk movement and an idol for Dylan. The image of the free-spirited traveller became a key motif of Dylan’s early years and, arguably, throughout his career. Dylan soon dropped out of university and, ostensibly to meet Woody, hitchhiked to Greenwich Village in New York, home of the flourishing folk revival. He arrived in New York in December 1961, aged twenty. It might be expected that such a promising talent would be warmly welcomed on the scene but this was not so. His welcome would be best described as ambivalent: some people were drawn to the charismatic kid with a Woody Guthrie obsession, while others thought him phoney and contrived. In his first recorded original song, Dylan lampoons the response to his arrival, and immediately positions himself as an outsider by mispronouncing ‘Green-witch Village’: